By Marsha Henry Goff
‘A Lonesome Lot’
For Mary Hammond Sly and other Euro-American settlers who arrived in Kansas in the mid-1800s, life was unpredictable and full of loss
O
riginally from New York, Mary and John Sly had lived a year in Ohio with their two children before journeying in 1857 to homestead in Nemaha County, Kansas Territory. They knew the five-week trip via flatboat and ox-drawn covered wagon would be arduous, but it soon became more difficult than expected as Sly was three-months pregnant with their third child. The couple had decided to risk the journey because of the land. In a letter to her sister Elizabeth, Sly favorably compared their new 100 acres of Kansas land to familiar locations of their native upstate New York. Before the year was up, she was urging her sister and brotherin-law to join them in Kansas. “If you are coming the sooner the better,” she wrote, “for the country is filling fast and the first settlers have altogether the best chance. No man can hold but 160 acres and they have to be 21.” Sly did sound one note of caution about the mosquito-borne disease then known as “ague” and which we now call malaria. She suggested family ties could help overcome this disease. “If you do have the ague a few weeks we are here and may be able to lend a helping hand.” But malaria was a serious threat that affected almost every pioneer, including Sly’s family. She had given birth to her third child while suffering from the disease. She “employed a botanical physician, who lives
Author’s Note My great-greatgrandmother, Mary Hammond Sly, was born in New York in 1822 to parents who believed in educating their daughters as well as their sons. A school teacher before marriage, she faithfully kept journals every year of her life. The only surviving journal, spanning 1894–1900, was in my paternal grandmother’s possession. However, I am fortunate to have copies of several letters she wrote throughout those same years. This article is based on those letters describing her life as a pioneer.
OPPOSITE A blacksmith at Old Albany Days in Sabetha takes part in an annual celebration recreating pioneer life in Kansas. The daily scenes they reenact would have been familiar to Mary Hammond Sly.
four miles from us in Nebraska, he gave 16 pills to be taken in 8 hours and I have not had but one shake since and that was the next day after my little Catherine Elizabeth was born. A good old lady was obliged to officiate as M.D. as the doctor had just gone, thinking I could wait until in the night (I was glad he left though).” Caring for a husband and three children, all of whom had bouts of malaria, was hard for Sly, who was clearly accustomed to having household help and was distressed at being unable to find it. She eventually hired a 12-year-old girl and paid her three dollars for 10 days of work. The situation was so bad she admitted to her sister that “I was so discouraged as to make threats at one time,” but concluded that admission with her change of heart: “I am not sorry now that we are here.” “The climate,” she wrote, “is rather variable—subject to frequent changes of temperature, but generally dry and little fog or gloomy weather. Winds are generally high, but no more so than is common in all open prairie countries.” She notes that “coal abounds but is not of good quality although it is believed that heavier coal and better veins underlays the country, also that there is an abundance of building stone and limestone, sand and water.” The latter was found in streams and springs or by digging to a depth of 25 to 60 feet. To persuade her sister and brother-in-law to migrate to Kansas, she writes, “The soil is unsurpassed for fertility. On this point it would be hard to exaggerate.”
WINTER 2020 | KANSAS! MAGAZINE
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